The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Depending on its size, a packet switching device can receive and switch packets of a small number of flows of packets to many millions of flows of packets. Some or all packets of a flow, or of multiple flows, are sometimes unexpectedly dropped. This dropping could be due to a software or hardware error, or even according to proper processing by the packet switching device that is configured to cause different than desired results. Moreover, the unexpected dropping of packets of one or more flows might be transient in nature.